


Ode to the Undying

by Wallyallens



Category: Game of Thrones (TV)
Genre: Other
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-06-07
Updated: 2016-06-07
Packaged: 2018-07-12 19:25:03
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,269
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7119367
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Wallyallens/pseuds/Wallyallens
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>In the midst of a war, a single death is nothing.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Ode to the Undying

**Author's Note:**

  * For [sansasnarks](https://archiveofourown.org/users/sansasnarks/gifts).



Despite the best efforts of the men ordered to protect her, Sansa felt the dead weight of certainty in her gut as the scraping on the other side of her door grew louder, heavy in her centre, a cold lump of metal resting within her: she was going to die.

The Battlefield was not confined to the Wall as Jon had hoped: all of the North lay in fire and blood, not one place left untouched by the Army of the Dead. Like a wave, they surged across the lands, an unstoppable force – the dead did not need to rest, or eat, nor did they take the time to enjoy their spoils of war in the vindictive way most armies did. There was no satisfaction. Only a steady, unbroken tide of death, the army growing with each life it took, gaining speed and strength. It would overcome them all.

It was reminiscent of all the great stories: how to defeat an unbeatable foe. 

Sansa imagined her father would be steadfast and logical in the way he approached the problem: he would gather support, find a weakness to exploit, use strategy in the face of odds stacked high above his head. Her mother would rally men, as was in her nature. She had always possessed such a quick wit and ability to bend men’s minds and hearts to her cause that Sansa admired, and later envied when she needed those same skills to take back Winterfell. In this battle, her Mother would be the most valuable asset – fighting men was something they needed direly.

Her siblings would act less strategically, but she ached in longing for them to be there right then anyway, if only so that she was not there alone. But no – she didn’t want that at all. She didn’t want them all to die with her – and yet she had always imagined they would go together, or simply defy death evermore in refusal to die apart.

It had sustained her during her time in the Red Keep, this little daydream that none of them could die without the others, that if there was any forces of good left in the world, the type people wrote songs about, they _had_ to meet again. That all of those legends about Starks and Direwolves, her father’s words about a pack – a bond that transcended the confines of mortality and physical pain, that even despite all that had happened to her, what could have become of the others – that the pack would survive; that they would be reunited and then – only then, would death dare to touch a single one.

That dream had been shattered the moment news of Robb’s death met her; the sun had dimmed a little that day and never regained its vibrancy.

Oh, Robb . . . if he were here, she had no doubt as where he would be. There never was with him – her brother was clear as water, as transparent in his love and motivations as the stream was in getting to the sea. He would be in midst of the battle, wherever he was needed; if he had any choice in the matter, he would be fighting at Jon’s side. 

In most of her memories, the two were together. _Robb and his Shadow_ , she had once joked meanly with her friends before she left, _if only there could be a shadow as light as Snow. So I guess that makes him a Ghost instead_.

After he named his direwolf her teasing name, she always wondered if he’d heard her calling him that. She hoped he had not. Now more than ever, she hoped Jon truly forgave her for those times, for how awful she had been to him in youth, for believing something as silly as not sharing a last name made him anything less than her brother. 

It was not true. It was never easy, like it had been with Robb or Bran or even Rickon, who had been just a toddler when she had left, but Jon had been her true brother since they had been reunited – he stood by her when she asked the world of him, was kind when she needed that, argued with her when she was wrong. He was as true a Stark as any of them.

She was glad to have known him, and to have seen him for what he truly was, even if that realisation came too late. The banging on her door was getting louder, the dead clamouring for more blood on the other side, drumming away the seconds to her death, rattling the hinges. Wherever he was, she prayed Jon was safe.

The others were harder to imagine in this war.

Arya was a small girl with a bird’s nest for hair and crooked teeth the last time Sansa had seen her. Although she was fierce as the wolf whose visage Sanda branded on her clothing and seal, the symbol of their house, Arya was just a child – they would not have let her fight, although she imaged her sister would argue that judgement even as Robb and Jon marched off. Arya probably still had hair chopped around her shoulders like a boy, that little sword in her hand like it was attached – if she had practised as she had in King’s Landing, her sister could be a great warrior by now.

Sansa knew she would still tower over her, though, and a fleeting smile graced her lips at the thought, even in the cacophony of the dead. If she was there, Arya would use that little sword to help them escape. Either that or she would have snuck out to fight anyway, never one to back down, even when that was the only option.

Brienne would have liked Arya, if they met more than the once they did. She hoped they found each other again, and her Knight helped her sister make her way home the way she did Sansa. 

Bran and Rickon were as entwined as Robb and Jon in her memories, probably because they were the youngest, the ones she had least time with. 

By the time Rickon was born, she had been more concerned with becoming a lady than spending time with a baby who cried and vomited and made a mess, something she sorely regretted now. She could picture Rickon best at her mother’s hip, already with the mischievous smile learnt from Robb on his face. Maybe he would be fighting, or manning the walls of the castle for danger now – able to fight, willing to, but kept out of the thick of the fighting. 

He and Bran, at least, would be there with her now if they were all together. She knew they were too young to fight, and she had been told that Bran had been crippled by his fall the day they left Winterfell. She had left before he opened his eyes. Sansa had never been able to picture what a grown Bran would look like in her mind’s eye, not that way – he was a bird, he climbed the walls as if they were stairs, feet never touching the ground. She could not imagine him crippled, unable to walk. She had only those images of him in movement when she thought – Bran running, Bran climbing, Bran with a face split with joy with only the open space of the sky behind him. 

Jon had left her at Winterfell after they had won it back, a sad kind of smile on his face as he declared it hers for all to hear. He still thought he wasn’t worthy. If anyone was to become Lord after she was gone, she wanted it to be him. 

He had taken his own army to meet the dead at Castle Black, telling her to stay in Winterfell at all costs, that walls that had withstood a thousand sieges would keep her protected inside. Jon had tried to frame it as a noble thing on the day he left, for her to stay – “t’keep them safe too, so the people have someone to maintain hope. The Stark name will do that”, he had said. 

She had replied with something she had heard said among the people since their arrival, words that could only have sprung from one of her parents mouths.

“There must always be a Stark at Winterfell,” she told him. Jon had blinked at that, nodding in a resigned way but forcing the edges of his lips into a semblance of smile. He had frozen when she placed a hand on his shoulder before he could turn to go, adding. “Which is why you must return. You must come home, once all this is done.”

Jon had smiled then, a real one. It drained the weight of the worry from his face, red and chapped from the cold as it was, from the sternness of the Lord Commander with eyes stained from seeing too much, relaxing into a softer expression. The smile reached his eyes, and he nodded in understanding.

“Stay safe.”

Those were his last words as he left for a war they had little hope of winning, but fought anyway – leaving Winterfell for the first time as a Stark. His men filed out on foot and horseback, heading North until they vanished from sight, although she watched from the tower as long as they could, until they blended into the white wastes. By then, the castle was lit only by candlelight, a feeble attempt to keep the darkness at bay as she carried her tiny flame to her old room, comforted to be at home.

It was there she stood now, leaning against the icy stone wall across from a door heaving, groaning like a wounded thing against the weight of the dead. It splintered and cracked under the pressure, leaving fissures wood with fingers scraping through, grabbing for her, bursting at the seams to get through. It would not hold for long. Once the door was down, there was nowhere for her to run – she had that same candle for protection, nothing more. 

Just a flame and herself.

Sansa felt her heart flutter in her chest, clamouring to stay alive, to keep beating despite her mind’s certainty that it would not, a contradiction which only served to bind her to the moment. She was too aware of the blood rushing in her ears, eye drawn to every splinter sent flying from the door as it broke, of the temperature of the wall behind her, cold as the grave. 

She should have been afraid.

But after all that she had survived, kept alive by the kindness of strangers and her own mind, able to navigate the game of life without falling behind, for the most part, she was not. She could not be. Death had been a moment away since her father was branded a traitor – it was almost a relief to have the uncertainty of when it would come for her taken away. She thought she would be executed for Joffrey’s death. She had wanted to die under Ramsey’s control, to be free of him. Dozens of times, she had gasped breaths like they were her last, and now she finally stood facing doom she could not outrun.

As the door fell, she decided: they would not take her.

Sansa Stark turned as the dead piled into the room, gathered up her skirts, and ran at the window – she did not pause before she jumped.  
In her eyes, Winterfell lay at her feet, the sun setting over the towering stone walls, a thousand memories in those halls and in the courtyard below rushing up to meet her at once; with his perfect sun-soaked image of home, she closed her eyes as she fell.

There was a time she was sure she would be a Queen, immortalised through her reign and golden in the minds of the people. There was a time she thought she would be sung about as a Wolf of Winterfell, her smile hiding fangs as deadly as her beauty. There was a time she hoped only to be remembered as her own, not Joffrey’s or Tyrion’s or Ramsey’s, only as Sansa. There was a time she prayed she would be remembered at all.

Her last thought was to wonder if this would be how they remembered her now – Sansa Stark, the Untamed Wolf, who refused to surrender to any man, living or dead, and flew from the walls of Winterfell rather than be captured.

There was no time for thoughts after that, only a bombardment of images flooding her mind: her family – her father here in his home, not a prisoner in Kings Landing; her mother carrying little Rickon with a smile on her face; Robb and Jon practising at sword fighting in the courtyard she plummeted towards, laughter and playful insults escaping their lips; Bran in the Godswood, running through the trees, faster than any of them; Arya with a sword in her hand and scowl on her face, unbreakable.

The ones still living, she prayed for their safety. She wanted them to find each other.

She hoped they did better than she did.

Sansa Stark died hoping, with a sigh of relief passing from her lips until the moment she hit the ground. Outside, the way the wind flew through the Godswood whistled in the trees, as if the North itself cried out in mourning as her flame was extinguished; as the wind grew so it echoed through the halls of Winterfell, it almost sounded like the sorrowful howling of a wolf.

**Author's Note:**

> literally just to get even with Janie (sansasnarks).


End file.
